EOF - Waving Goodbye to Facebook

In a blog post last April titled “Building the Social Web
Together”, Mark
Zuckerberg of Facebook wrote, “The power of the open graph is that it helps
to create a smarter, personalized Web that gets better with every action
taken.” The “open graph” of which he speaks is your
social graph—your
collection of contacts—on Facebook, augmented by “personalized
experiences” with the likes of “Microsoft Docs, Yelp and
Pandora”—which
are Facebook's “three pre-selected partners”.

Responding in his own Newsweek blog, Barrett Sheridan called Zuckerberg's
plans a “Play to Take Over the Entire Internet”. In
TechCrunch, MG
Siegler's headline read, “I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The
Internet”. Whether or not Facebook is that ambitious, it won't succeed at
anything other than enlarging itself. The limits to that are those of any
private architecture. It can get big, but not bigger than the planet. What
Facebook has built is the Great Indoors. A lot of people like going there,
just like a lot of people like going to shopping malls. But Facebook is a
building, not geology.

The Web is geology. It is a wide-open public space on which private and
public structures can be built in boundless varieties. Linux is probably the
most widely used building material below and within those structures.
Calculating its value is pointless, because—as Eric S. Raymond made
clear long ago—Linux has use value more than sale value. As useful
stuff, its leverage is boundless and, therefore, incalculable. It also
will last as long as it remains useful.

The same cannot be said of Facebook, whose value is quite calculable and
which will thrive only as long as its revenue model and its investors'
patience holds out. Both of those will be shortened by the dissatisfaction
of users, which Facebook has been risking increasingly over the years.

To see how this has been going, it helps to check with Facebook's “Eroding
Privacy Policy: A Timeline”, by the EFF. It shows how, during the five years
of its existence, Facebook's privacy policy has ratcheted down from
respectful to exploitative. And, why not? Facebook's customers are
advertisers, not users. As a user, your influence on Facebook rounds to
zero. The company is far more interested in making you into better bait for
advertisers and visitors who click on ads. A side benefit is “a smarter,
personalized Web” that is not the Web at all, but rather an indoor
commercial habitat with some nice conveniences.

We've seen this movie before, many times. The most important and dramatic
example is Microsoft's “HailStorm”, which arrived and flopped in 2001. As
with all heavy weather, it threatened to change (at least superficially)
the Web's geology...

The HailStorm architecture is designed for seamless extensibility and
consistency across services. It provides common identity, messaging,
naming, navigation, security, role-mapping, data modeling, metering and
error handling across all “HailStorm” services. And rather than risk
compromising the user-centric model by having advertisers pay for them, the
people receiving the value—end users—will be the primary source of
revenue. “HailStorm” will help move the Internet to end-user subscriptions,
in which users pay for value received.

...by putting the Net itself inside Microsoft's own building. That didn't
work. Nor will anything Facebook does for roughly the same purposes.

Of course, Microsoft wasn't talking about the real Internet. It was
talking about the commercial activity happening on top of the Net.
Likewise,
Facebook isn't talking about the Web, but rather the “social
networking”
that's been all the craze during the past few years, and which seems to be
happening mostly within and between commercial entities.

As Facebook seems determined not to learn from the failings of its
elders, how about moving past all the commercial interests here? How about
making our own social networks—ones that are owned by nobody (or close
enough), used by everybody and improved by anybody? How would we do that?

One possibility is Google's Wave. It's a way to meet, collaborate, share
files and do other literally social stuff. It's also an open-source project
that still needs a lot of shaking down. And, although Google hosts the first
incarnation, it's still there for anybody else to run with it, fork it or
whatever. Here's how Joel David Palmer summed up the possibilities, in a
blog post by Steven Hodson:

At the extreme in personal control, we could each configure our own
computer as a little wave server and have primary control of our social
networking server logs. Less extreme than this, any community or
association that's used to serving e-mail could as easily and securely
serve waves to their group.

Widespread adoption of waves would automatically reclaim a lot of user
privacy and personal responsibility for on-line communications of every
kind. The contents cannot be mined by outside interests without committing
criminal acts—waves are as private as e-mail.

Waves give you and your connections complete control over your social
networking experience, and real opportunities for creative collaboration. A
wave can be e-mail, telephone, IM, videophone, collaboration platform, art
form, performance venue. Transitioning to waves appears to be a good
strategy toward a collaborative social Web that is peer-to-peer rather than
server-client.

Sounds good to me. If you've got any better ideas, let's hear them. Maybe
we can coax some Facebook occupants—including ourselves, in many
cases—to come enjoy the Great Outdoors.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. He is
also a fellow with the
Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and the
Center
for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara.

To me diaspora sounds like something going into the right direction. What we need are standard protocols for social networking on the net. Webservices, or something similar, then tie the different 'human repositories' together, where every human can control all information itself. whether that information is histed at myspace, facebook, diaspora, hyves, or any other local alternative, like my home server... We chioose our social 'dashboard' provider independently. That social dashboard could be enriched, or polluted, take your pick, by commercial information targeted at the user of the dashboard. So that's where to money is. Of course I could also implement and host my own dashboard at home. Or just have a plain old desktop application as dashboard.

So the ultimate answer to facebook is open social networking standards, to be implemented by anyone. use an uddi like discovery method and we're in business. The thing is, who will sponsor such an effort?

This is a much more dangerous move then you are giving credit for. Especially when you consider Comcast and Verizon play penning such a creation and charging to reach areas of the web outside the monster.

Its not a dooms day scenario but it is the first logical steps to locking down the net. You would have to shape off a chunk of the internet to pacify normal people. They of course they would only want the people who spend money.(Thank God the people who keep it running are not the ones who spend money)

On a similar note please help wikipedia keep its lights on being able to access the worlds knowledge is a neat thing.But thats the whole crazy problem how can we make people who cant follow a crazy ranting post like this understand how important it is that the current impression of the internet needs to be drastically reformed.

PS. The human race needs to evolve a fair bit more before we can use Google wave. It makes my head explode. Its like creating YouTube before the words broad band ment anything.

I agree with your comments on Facebook, but I'm having difficulty seeing Google Wave as a replacement. Wave looks like it has a lot of potential for collaboration on a project, but I don't see being able to use it for social networking. My social networking doesn't consist of project collaboration.

I recently started using Dropbox, just the free account to try it out. Seemed pretty good (for limited purposes), so I clicked on their link to share it on Facebook. Facebook informed me that Dropbox wanted permission to: Access my basic information; Post to my Wall; Access my data any time; Access my photos & videos.

I had no problem with the first 2. I thought the rest was a little much.

I don't know how much Dropbox has to do with exactly what is being asked for. It was my impression that that is just the way Facebook sets things up.

Wave was a good try, but it wasn't even close to being anything like facebook is today. Yes facebook has had privacy issues, but so will all these other social sites that need money to run and have a 20 year old trying to figure out the business plan.

Diaspora is promising, but way behind. We need an innovative facebook/diaspora/twitter/identica/foursquare/gowalla/posterous mashup - not a copycat.